This invention relates to a system for marketing merchandise or services capable of being demonstrated to prospective customers over telephone lines, such as phonograph records or tapes (cartridges or cassettes), books, plays and tours, and for immediately accepting orders of selected merchandise or services.
The recording industry faces a very real and potentially serious problem in marketing phonograph records and tapes. Over the past 20 years or more, manufacturers of such recordings have prospered by directing a majority of their sales efforts to the youth. This youth market has been viewed as ever increasing due to at least one factor which is subsiding, namely a steady population growth. However planned parenthood has severely curtailed the rate of population growth so that the recording industry must look to the older adult groups for a continued market growth.
The recording industry has largely ignored the preferences and shopping habits of adults who have neither the time nor the inclination to keep abreast of the most recent recordings offered, much less to browse through the most recent recordings offered by the industry through record stores. The problem of reaching the adult market is becoming more difficult because record stores no longer provide facilities for the customer to listen to recordings as they did in the early days of the recording industry.
Record clubs have provided a convenient way for more mature individuals to buy recordings through the mail, but the selection must necessarily be made solely from a catalog description of the recordings offered. Consequently, even though one may know the title of a musical composition in mind, and sometimes even the name of the recording artist, one would like to confirm that the recording being considered from the catalog is the particular one in mind. There is therefore a great need for some way of demonstrating recordings to customers at remote locations to enable them to decide on purchases.
In addition to phonograph records and tapes, mature individuals are inclined to purchase other goods susceptible of audio demonstration such as books or recordings of books, movies, stage shows, plays, video disks or tapes, pay television shows and the like. They may even be inclined to purchase still other types of merchandise and services susceptible of being adequately described in an audio presentation, such as tours abroad, current stock market analysis of particular securities, and so forth.